


Dream a Little Dream of Me

by Vrunka



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: M/M, No Sex, Spoilers for RE6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-19
Updated: 2013-01-19
Packaged: 2017-11-26 01:03:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/644827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vrunka/pseuds/Vrunka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chris dreams in shades of people he used to know. Post RE 6.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dream a Little Dream of Me

**Author's Note:**

> No sex, but people have said I should write a post 6 piece, dealing with Chris' coping. So I did. This was not easy for me to write because the end of Chris' story ruined my life.

This is a dream.

Jill has never visited a bar with you in your life. And certainly never when she was blonde. The color is Wesker’s doing. You had asked about it on the plane ride home.

She is drinking scotch, smiling at you over her glass. She doesn’t even wince at the flavor. Her cheeks are flush and you wish you could wake up. But you can’t.

“Hey, Chris,” she says, and Jesus, it even sounds like her. A perfect imitation of her alto.

“You’re not real,” you tell her. Fingering you own glass. Straight whiskey, leave the bottle, thanks. You were warned; O’Brian himself called to tell you that if you dip into alcoholism again, the BSAA won’t hesitate to let you go. If it fucks up your life on your own time, fine. But when it interferes with fighting bio-terrorism, well that just won’t stand.

Never mind that everyone is dead.

Sherry sent you an e-mail, apologizing for your loss. It was sweet in a way. Completely useless, but sweet. Leon--fucking Leon--hasn’t even called. The BSAA told you they’d make sure his memory was immortalized, that they would name some wing of the building after him or something.

You buried a fucking empty box.

It was the seventh time you’ve had to do that.

You’d think it would hurt less now, but it doesn’t.

“You still with me?” Jill asks, tilting her head. Leaning her elbows on the bar.

“Why am I dreaming this?”

She smiles. Cheeks dimpling. She’s always had chipmunk cheeks, just a little too round to be considered sexy. She used to lament the shape of her face, back before Raccoon happened, when stuff like dating mattered. “Why do we dream anything? You’re lonely. I can hardly blame you.” She spins slowly, facing you fully. “They didn’t even give you time to grieve this time around.”

“The fight against terrorism never sleeps,” you mutter. It’s what the director had said, three days before he had O’Brian call and threaten your job. You’ve been surfing the Kubler-Ross cycle for two weeks, unable to work past it. Trapped between denial and despair.

“That’s absolute bullshit,” she says. And although she is a figment of your imagination, it makes you feel a little bit better. Knowing Jill would be on your side, no matter what. “And so is this whole ‘you shouldn’t have let him go’ thing.”

“What?”

“You know what I’m talking about. You’ve convinced yourself that if you had remembered him, if you hadn’t had your little brush with amnesia, that you never would have let him accompany you on a mission as dangerous as Waiyip.”Jill is frowning now. Swirling the liquid in her glass. “You knew him better than anyone. He wouldn’t have let you go alone.”

“He died saving me.”

“Twice,” Jill agrees. “And that destroys you, I know. But there isn’t anything you could have done.”

Suddenly, viciously, you hate yourself for dreaming up this version of Jill. She’s right, of course. And you hate that too. “Just go away,” you say, clutching your glass. Wishing it would shatter, wake you up from this parody of consolation. Jill smiles again, winks as she polishes off her liquor and then, just like that, she is gone. You drink your whiskey and try to forget this is a dream.

“You’re a fucking lush,” someone behind you says.

You don’t need to turn to know who it is. But you do anyway. Your mind has made him look more like his father than you rightly think he did. His eyes are the same cold blue. Same perfect, haughty sneer. You don’t know terribly much about Jake Muller. Your mind has filled in the fuzzier details with things you know about Wesker. It’s like looking at a funhouse mirror version, makes your stomach go tight with vertigo.

“No wonder you and my father hit it off so well,” he says. Your cheek stings, a bright line of pain where he shot you those few days ago, “I mean. Essentially you two are the same. Using people to get what you want. No matter the cost, huh? No matter how many people die to get you there.” He crosses his arms, eyes narrowed. So like his father. “Oh, but I forgot. It’s all for the greater good. That’s what they say, right? What you say. To make yourself feel better.”

Jake crosses the room, leans at the bar where Jill had so recently been. Fishes a pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of his jacket. Wesker didn’t smoke. You don’t know why your figment of Jake does.

“You’re the last person I want to see,” you say. Jake smiles, exhales the smoke in a smooth line.

“I share that sentiment, big guy,” he mutters. “Yet, here I am. Like the Ghost of Christmas Future. You’re gonna wanna drink up while you can.”

“What do you mean?”

Jake snorts, half-smiles. It’s one of Wesker’s smiles, more teeth and predatory edges than happiness. “Just saying. You wake up, you’re going to be in a dry house again. Facing all this shit sober. Might as well indulge while you’re here. In fact, I think I’ll join you.” He turns toward the bar, flags down a woman who you recognize, though you can’t place why. Her accent is heavy, European. Edonia. You know why you know her now. Whiskey. Leave the bottle. “Got any tequila?” Jake asks her, tapping cigarette ash out on the bar. She pours the drink without looking at you. Pushes it over to him. “I mean,” Jake continues, plopping down on the barstool, twisting to half-face you, “no better way to honor his memory, right?”

“Fuck you.”

Jake chuckles, lifts his glass. “What do you say? To Piers?”

The anger is like a flash; from simmer to boil in the second it takes Jake to say a single syllable. You feel rather justified when you punch him in his smirking face. It feels good like punching Wesker felt good, like lancing a wound. His glass goes flying, shatters on the floor a few feet away. “Don’t you say his fucking name,” you hiss, holding Jake by the collar of his shirt. That smirk hasn’t fled, but the blood from his broken nose blocks some of it out.

“You can hit me all you want,” he says, holding his hands up by either side of his head, “it won’t change the fact that it’s your fault that he’s dead.”

“We were there because of you,” you say. More like growl. Low and feral, twisted under your breath. The bartender is gone. You want to kill Jake, strangle the life out of him. He’s not his father, but that doesn’t make him good. You were there--you and Piers were there because of him. Because of Sherry. Piers wouldn’t have had to infect himself if you’d never been there in the first place.

Jake chuckles again. There is blood staining his teeth. “Keep telling yourself that, tiger,” he says. “Funny how Sherry and I got out okay. You’re the only one who lost someone. You’re the only one who ever loses someone.” You let him drop. He’s not Jake. Killing him won’t make anything better. Won’t help you wake up from this. You pinch your arm, hard, dig your nails in. But nothing happens. “Having trouble there?” Jake asks from the floor. Looking up at you from under his lashes. His eyes are different now, orange and red. Irises kissed by fire. He stands up as you back away from him.

“Sit down, Christopher,” he says in a voice that is not Jake’s. A voice you haven’t heard in four years, “you’re acting like a child.” Wesker fixes the stool that got upended when you punched Jake, gestures back to where you had been sitting. “It was hardly cute when you were twenty-five, it especially isn’t now that you’re pushing forty.”

You don’t know what else to do. You sit.

“I. I drank too much last night. That’s why I can’t wake up,” you say, swallowing.

Wesker doesn’t smile. Doesn’t even act like he can hear you. “You killed me.” he says.

There is no argument. You did.

“How many more people have to die before you realize it?” Wesker asks, contemplative, sipping your whiskey without asking. Cool and refined. Distant. He had lost his mind in Africa, he was mad. Rabid. You don’t know what to do with this passiveness.

“Realize what?”

“That you can’t have happiness.” Wesker’s eyes narrow, he places the glass down. It clinks against the bar. You remember Piers, eating his steak. The sound of cutlery, how foreign it was in the bar. How you had known him, even though you couldn’t remember how. But you had known that you knew him. You had recognized his lips. Wesker snaps his fingers, you focus your attention back on him. “You weren’t born for it. Alcoholic son of an alcoholic father. Useless. Whining. Whenever you get close to someone they die: Forest, Richard, Joseph, Kenneth, Enrico, DeChant, Dave, Finn,” Wesker lists, tapping his fingers on the bar for each name. “And then of course there’s me. And then of course there’s Piers.”

You dig your fingers into your palm, trying to displace the sorrow that floods you with the use of his name.

“He would never have been assigned to finding you if you hadn’t been as close to him as you were. Lovers,” Wesker sneers. “Boyfriends. That’s why the higher ups sent him. Because he would know how to find you, to drag you back into it. Love is a weakness, Christopher. And your little boyfriend, he was full of weakness.”

“Stop it.”

“And you’re weak. Always were. Hot, sure. Fuckable. Loyal. Weak.” Wesker leans in, breath hot against your cheek. His eyes blaze. “Why do you think I picked you, huh? Out of all the options. Because you tote that word love like it means something. Like it will give you strength. And yet what has it gotten you?” He chuckles, smoothly, leaning back again. “Nothing. Nothing but pain and vulnerability.”

“I said stop it!” you snap, standing suddenly. Sick of the entire thing. It isn’t a mystery how you feel about yourself. It isn’t new to you. You know that you were the one at fault. You know that time and time again you fail people and that in a business like yours that failure means death.

Wesker grins. “You don’t know how to love, Christopher,” he says. “You just use it as an excuse to get people killed. If you had simply fucked the boy, once or twice, gotten him out of your system and moved on, he would have been better off. If you’d stayed lost, he would have been better off. If you’d died in Edonia, he would have been--,”

“Shut the fuck up!” You hit the bar, hit it hard. Your hand aches with the impact. You do not wake up. When you look back to where Wesker had been, he is gone. The bartender is back, like she was never gone. She levels you a look and you sit down. “Whiskey,” you say.

“I think you’ve had enough.”

“It’s my fucking dream and I want some fucking whiskey.”

She slides a glass over and pours you another.

You wake up feeling worse than when you went to sleep, which is impressive considering you were flirting with alcohol poisoning when you passed out. Two bottles of brandy will do that to a person. You sit up, dizzy with vertigo and glance at your nightstand. The bottle you’d been courting last night has been knocked over. Good thing it was empty. Your hand aches dully.

You sigh and stand, run your fingers through your hair. You’ve been careful, these past two weeks, kept your drinking as on the sly as possible. Last night was especially tough. Two days ago you buried a box. They had asked if there was anything of his you wanted to put in there, as a token or a placeholder or some shit. You had told them no. Piers’ patch sits on the island in your kitchen. You miss him more than you know what to do with.

The headache follows you through the house, clinging to your every move. You don’t feel woozy though, it hasn’t hit your stomach yet. Small favors. That bottle was the last in the house. It’s seven am. No liquor store is open this early. You sit at your kitchen table (still set for two, his placemat and yours, you’d called him a fag for wanting placemats in the first place) and hold your head in your hands. But you don’t cry. You haven’t been able to cry. You’ve handled everything on auto-pilot. Completely dry-eyed.

You’re going to retire. You have to retire. You can’t do this anymore. Not any of it. You can’t fucking handle watching people die. Not anymore. You’ve already lost too much. Your cellphone is charging on the counter, next to Piers’ patch. At seven am someone is in the office. You stand, feeling dizzier now, completely off-balance, and move toward the phone.

“I thought you’d promised,” Piers says. He is standing on the other side of the counter, looking down at your phone, at his patch. He looks like him. The way he was. There is no touch of mutation. No touch of death. It’s impossible, of course. He can’t be there. But you so want to believe it. You are desperate to.

“I’m still dreaming?” you ask. You can’t make it a statement.

Piers looks down, rubs the back of his head and grins. “Looks like it,” he says. “Unless you believe in ghosts.”

“I’ve killed worse than ghosts.”

His eyes are sad. “But you don’t really believe in them.” He crosses his arms on the counter, leans forward. “You made me a promise, Chris.”

“I didn’t promise you anything.”

“I died for the BSAA. I died because they need you more than me.”

“You died because I wasn’t strong enough to protect you!” You aren’t yelling, but your words are clipped and harsh. Carnivorous. Cannibalistic. Everything from earlier coming out in a wave. There was nothing psychic or special about those moments, those people, that dream. It was all you, how you felt. Your subconscious is just creative in its self-mutilation it seems.

Piers’ mouth tightens, the edges of his eyes crinkling. “How could you believe that?” he asks. Quietly. No hint of condemnation. But that isn’t right. Piers should be mad. He should want to kill you. He should blame you. He should be echoing Wesker and Jake. It was all your fault. Every single thing. Piers reaches across the counter, fingers stopping just short of your face, hovering.

“It’s true,” you say. “That’s how I believe it.”

Piers sighs. His hand drops. “I can’t convince you otherwise if you aren’t willing to listen to me,” he says. Swallowing. He isn’t wearing his uniform, he’s in a t-shirt and jeans. Weekend clothes. You can see his Adam’s apple move with his breathing. You were always mesmerized by his throat.

“You should hate me.”

“I could never hate you,” he says, looking up. “Not ever. And I’m. I’m sorry it hurts. But I did what I had to do.” He frowns. “You couldn’t leave me behind; I would have followed you on that mission regardless. You couldn’t predict things would turn out the way they did. You couldn’t save me once it was done. And you can’t drink me back.” He is walking, moving around the island counter to stand in front of you. “You’re only killing yourself, now,” he whispers once he’s close. “And what good will that do anyone?”

“We could be together again,” you offer, hopelessly.

“Suicides don’t go to heaven.”

You chuckle, humorless and dry. “There’s a heaven?”

Piers grins, small and tight. “I wouldn’t know. I’m just a figment of your imagination.”

You nod, slowly. Raise your hand to touch his arm. He doesn’t disappear at the contact and you don’t phase through. No apparition this. Flesh and blood dreams, like Jake had been. “I wish you weren’t.”

“I know you do,” he says. He is still smiling, though there is an edge of mourning to it now. Inevitable. Piers, right now, is all that matters. “You have to listen. They need you, Chris. More than ever. Bio-terrorism never sleeps, you know the saying. And yeah, it’s a load of shit, but if the recruits don’t have someone like you to tell them that, then how will they know it is?”

“I don’t understand.” You say. Because you don’t. You can’t. Piers is too close, you can smell him, touch him. It’s like he’s really there. He leans against you, tips his head to rest it on your shoulders.

“You will,” he says and you can hear the up-turn of his lips in his voice. How calm and sure he is. He was always wiser than you. “Just stick with it. Okay? For me? Please? Honor my memory with them, like that. Not like this.” He cranes his neck back and looks up at you. There isn’t much of a height difference, just enough that he has to go up on his toes to kiss you on the lips. Which he does.

And illusion or no, imagination or not, it feels like coming home. Like belonging.

You wake up and your phone is ringing and your neck is cramped from the way you were sleeping at the table. The hangover is gone, miraculously enough. You stand, still reeling from the dream and answer it.

“This is Chris.”

“Need you here, ASAP,” the man at the other end says. One of the director’s guys, you’re sure, you haven’t bothered to learn their names. “There’s been something of a situation.”

You manage not to roll your eyes. “Where?”

“Europe.”

As if it could be anywhere else. You drop your hand to the counter and notice that the patch which had been next to your phone is gone. “I’ll be there in thirty,” you say, distracted, looking around. Suddenly afraid that it’s missing. That you’ve lost it. But then you see it. Sitting on the table, not where you’d left it. Close to where you’d been sleeping. You don’t remember picking it up.

“See you in twenty,” the man says and hangs up.

You put your phone down. Walk over to the table, run your finger over the stitching.

“Okay.” you say. “I’m doing it.” You look up, feeling foolish, speaking out loud. Speaking to nothing. Or to something you don’t believe in. “But you’d better be waiting when I get there, you son of a bitch.”

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah. Okay. Thanks for reading it, hope it wasn't overly melodramatic or sappy and I hope you liked it. As always, feel free to leave me any comments/suggestions etc.


End file.
